Photo by Dominic Sayers

After all the controversy surrounding the future of Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores, everything seems to have settled down somewhat. Moores has left his position as coach without a whisper, Pietersen is back to being ‘just’ England’s best batsman and Andrew Strauss is the new skipper.

With this in mind, it seems as though the time has finally come to preview the West Indies tour. What is the best way to do this I hear you ask? Well, how about a brief summary of what we can expect from each player over the next couple of months?

Andrew Strauss – The new captain needs to lead from the front and continue his excellent form. A century in the first Test would do wonders for him.

Alistair Cook – We need to see more of a man that too often gets out after making a decent start. How many Test matches has he actually won for England?

Ian Bell – This is a huge tour for the Sherminator. He needs to repay the faith shown in him by scoring plenty of big scores batting at number three.

Kevin Pietersen – Been in the news for the wrong reasons recently and could do with winning back a few fans by showing why he is one of the best batsmen in the world.

Paul Collingwood – Like Ian Bell, could do with a few runs to establish his place in the side. Colly always seems to get a big innings when it matters though!

Owais Shah – Probably the unluckiest England cricketer. Seems to perform wonders in the one-dayers, but still likely to miss out to Ian ‘can’t buy a run’ Bell.

Andrew Flintoff – Anyone else get the feeling that Fred is going to peak just in time for the Ashes in the summer? It’s going to be a very productive tour for him in my opinion.

Matt Prior – The Sussex man is likely to start off with the gloves in West Indies and in all honesty, I wouldn’t be totally confident that he will still have them by the end of the tour. Needs runs.

We’ll leave it there for now and complete the preview next week where I shall be casting an eye over back-up keeper Tim Ambrose and the England bowlers charged with ripping through the West Indies batting line-up.

Until then – what would you top 6 be for the first Test? Does it pick itself or should Shah be given a go?

By Thomas Rooney – A sports writer who blogs about cricket betting

Tags: england cricket, west indies

A High Court ruling today suggests that the proposed multi million Twenty20 cricket match between the Stanford All Stars (i.e. the West Indies) and England is likely to be cancelled due to legal issues regarding the West Indies Cricket Board sponsorship deal with Digicel.

For the full info on the court ruling have a read of the BBC article and the one on CricInfo but essentially Digicel, the sponsors of the West Indies cricket team, have got their panties in a bunch and are unhappy that they’re going to receive little or no money from the $20 million head to head.

I’m not going to go into the rights or wrongs of the mini tournament Allen Stanford has organised. Well, not in this article, anyway, but I do have to ask the question on why this is an ICC recognised match in the first place. Let’s face it, folks, it’s nothing more than a glorified beer match. It’s not an international cricket fixture, for Gods sake.

I had no intention of writing about this whole sordid affair but todays news had me reaching…for the keyboard. Everything about this whole, sorry episode has me questioning the future of the beautiful game.

Oh bollocks. I’ve got one in my bonnet now so…

I find it obscene that any of the players, whether they be West Indians Stanford All Stars or England players are going to become dollar millionaires for playing a single game of cricket. It’s not even a proper fucking game of cricket. It says something for the tournament when the warm up game for the “main event” is a legends beach cricket match.

Now I’m sure that Allen Stanford has the best interest of the game at heart and he’s probably bemused by all this but come on. Enough is enough. How much more shit can we take about “player burnout” and then watch another meaningless cricket tournament on our pay-per-view subscriptions? IPL anyone? ICC Champions Trophy?

I’ve got a major beef with the ECB for agreeing to this match. It spells bad news for the future of cricket and I can’t understand why they took this on especially since they’re cash rich with the renewed Sky contract. I used to advertise Sky on this site but I’ve stopped now because, in some ways, I see Sky as being part of the problem.

Ball bags.

It’s late at night. I’ve had a few beers. I may not be as coherent as I should be and I’m sure that this post will pose as many questions as answers but, in essence, I’ll be more than happy if this dreadful whoring of cricket never happens.

Image credit: Duchessa

Tags: allen stanford, cricket, england, twenty20, west indies

I’ve set up a new area on the site to put together all of the previous video posts on Flintoffs Ashes as well as the featured videos from the sidebar. Since I don’t have an original thought in my head, I’ve called the section cricket videos.

The first featured video for the new look site was, naturally, one involving Andrew Flintoff. In this one we see the big fella taking on both Dwayne Bravo and Tino Best from the West Indies. The infamous sledge that led to Tino Best getting himself out. ‘Mind the windows, Tino’. Classic.

Tags: andrew flintoff, cricket, cricket video, west indies